Daily Inspiration Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Good humor, Thackeray suggests, is less a personality trait than a social technology: a portable, instantly legible signal that you know how to live among other people. Calling it an "article of dress" is the sly move. Clothes are chosen, tailored, and deployed; they are also read by strangers as shorthand for class, taste, and self-control. In mid-Victorian Britain, where manners were both moral code and social currency, "good humor" becomes the most flattering outfit in the room because it smooths the friction of crowded hierarchies without openly challenging them.

The subtext is pragmatic, even faintly cynical. Humor here isn't the comedian's disruptive wit but an agreeable temperament: the ability to absorb irritation, to deflect conflict, to keep the emotional weather pleasant. It's the kind of cheer that makes you employable, inviteable, and safe. Thackeray, a novelist who anatomized snobbery and status performance, knows that society rewards people who can make others comfortable - and penalizes those who insist on being raw, wounded, or righteous in public. "One can wear" implies choice: if your feelings are messy, your presentation doesn't have to be.

There's also a quiet critique embedded in the compliment. If good humor is a garment, it can be donned to conceal as much as to reveal. Victorian "society" prized polish; Thackeray hints that what passes for virtue may be etiquette in costume. The line flatters civility while winking at its theatricality: the best-dressed person isn't the richest, but the one who can keep the room from turning mean.